Creation & Fall of Man

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ . . . (NASB) Rom. 5:1

Ever wonder how the universe came into existence? Have you ever wondered how anything came into existence? The ancient creation stories reveal that men and women have always wanted to know. People today are still asking that question because we want to know where we came from and why we are here.

Most of us would laugh upon hearing many of the creation stories. Most of them assume that one or more gods existed, but from there the stories are very different. One of the stories comes from the Mande-speaking people, who live in southern Mali. They believe that the world was created by Mangala. Mangala was a powerful being who was composed of a variety of things, including twins. One was female and one was male. Mangala took seeds from the twins and put them into an egg. Inside the egg the seeds grew into fish. One of the fish, named Pemba, became ambitious and aggressive. He eventually threw some of the womb’s placenta down. That piece became the earth. The story continues with the creation of two tribes. One became farmers and the other was aristocratic. The story has great sexual overtones.

In the Shinto religion there are several creation stories. One of the stories teaches that Heaven and Earth and the In and Yo initially formed an egg. As time went by, heaven and earth separated within the egg. The heavier and grosser part settled down, leaving the purer and clearer above. The heavier part eventually became the earth, and purer part was the heaven above.

The Hindu religion has a creation story which teaches that Indra, king of the gods, and Vishnu, god of rain, created heaven from earth when the sun rose from the navel of the earth and a pillar was erected.

In another Hindu creation story, the God of the sky commits incest with his daughter and spills his seed on the ground. His golden seed eventually became a golden egg which was the universe. The egg split apart into heaven and earth, and the yoke became the sun.

Another story cannot explain how anything came into existence, but says that once a big ball of “something” exploded and the universe was formed. Within that universe a ball of gas and debris became rock and water and something began to grow in the slime. Eventually, a living sea creature came into existence in the water. One day it crawled upon the earth and became many different animals before it became a man and woman. The myth says that we are an accident.

These are some examples of various creation myths. Does anyone know how the universe was created? Where did we come from? The answer cannot be observed. No one was present when the first piece of matter came into existence. It is not possible for us to know how something was created out of nothing. It is a mystery we do not understand with our human minds. We are more accustomed to cause and effect. How can we have something from nothing? We would need to be God to know the answer, or we need God to tell us. God gives us the answer in the Bible.

The Bible has given us many prophecies to authenticate itself as coming from God. Session 2 gave us a number of important prophecies which have been fulfilled, and the book titled Evidence That Demands A Verdict by Josh McDowell lists many more. The Bible contains prophecies including predictions about cities, nations, places, people, and most importantly – Jesus Christ. They give us a reason to trust in the Bible as being sacred. There is not any other book like it. We can trust the Bible. It tells us how the universe was created, and the story is not fanciful. It requires only an all powerful being called God who does not use eggs, sex, or millions of years to accomplish anything. Why doesn’t the all powerful God need time to accomplish His wishes?

God’s Creative Act

In Genesis 1 God tells us that He created the world in six twenty-four hour days. He created our universe suddenly. Now that is power! That is what one can expect from God. He created a mature earth and an adult man and woman – Adam and Eve. The heavens and the earth and all that it contains were created in six days. The word “day” in the Hebrew language is YOHM. In Genesis 1 the word is used with a number such as the “first (1) day,” the “second (2) day, for example. When this happens, the word “day” refers to a 24 hour day – just as it does today. When Moses wrote that God made the heavens and earth in six days, his readers assumed 24 hour periods. Moses never says anything differently in the passage. This tells us the six days of creation are six 24 hour days. Scripture teaches that God created the universe suddenly and with maturity. Man was not created out of some egg, by some secondary god, the result of the Japanese concept of In and Yo, or somehow two sexes simultaneously evolved from water. We were intentionally created by a God who self-exists. Where did He come from? He has simply always existed. That is the mystery of God.

His Creation

Why did God create us? The answer is rather surprising. He did not do it because He wanted a place to live, sleep, or eat. He did not create us in order to have people worship Him. He did not create us to have pets to play with. The answer is found in Isaiah 43:7 where we are told that God created us for His glory. The complexities of the human body and our ability to speak, think, and make decisions remind us that there is an awesome designer. Our bodies, our universe, our world are all reminders that God is awesome. And there is more . . .

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. (NASB) Rom. 1:20

All that is around us is a reminder that He is invisible and awesome.

1. How did God create us, according to Gen. 1:26-27 and James 3:9?

2. What was man like when he was created, according to Eccl. 7:29?

3. In what other way is man like God, according to John 4:24 and Heb. 4:12?

4. Man and God are alike in other ways according to the following verses. Match the characteristic with the verse.

a. Man should love because God loves. John 7:17 and Isa. 14:24

b. Man can reason and so does God. John 21:17 and 2 Cor. 13:11

c. Man has a will like God. Isa. 1:18

d. Man can accomplish tasks. Gen. 2:15

The Fall

Sometime after Adam was created, God told Adam that he was not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was a test of Adam’s commitment to his relationship with God. Just as in any family or friendship, one’s faithfulness to another is always the real test of one’s desire for that relationship. Jesus told His disciples, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15). Jesus’ statement implies commitment to the relationship. God was already committed because He loved Adam and Eve. 1 John 4:8 and 16 says that God is love. This implies commitment and faithfulness. In relation to God, it involves our submission. But in Genesis 3, we discover that Satan was able to motivate Eve to doubt God. She eventually disobeyed God by eating of the fruit. We do not know what kind of fruit she ate, since scripture never tells us – that is not important – Satan was successful. She had violated the relationship by her disobedience.

The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate . . .(NASB) Gen. 3:4-6

Errors of Science

It’s too easy, with the benefit of modernity, hindsight, and all that, to regard science as the most fearless, objective, apolitical, democratic, and open-minded of human endeavors – the seeker of truth. Never mind anything by divine right . . .

Throughout the 16th century, as it gradually dawned on everybody that Columbus hadn’t, after all, hit some island off Japan or India (where he was headed at the time) but that he had in fact come across an entirely new continent, everything epistological hit the fan. For a comfortable 2,000 years, life, the universe, and everything had been what Aristotle . . . said it would be . . . So what was [America] doing there?

Things got rapidly worse in the first decades of the 17th century, as people like Galileo started seeing other centers of attraction, such as Jupiter circled by its moons. To compound the felony, sailors started coming back across the Atlantic to Europe with hundreds of new American animal and plant species that were not described in Aristotle’s list . . .

In the desperate search for some way to bail out the sinking ship or shut the stable door, a couple of quick thinkers came up with some solutions. One was a French engineer named Rene Descartes who . . . suggested that the only way to find truth was to go on doubting until you stripped away all dubious elements so as to arrive at a point where what remained was so self-evident that it was beyond doubt. That would be truth.

The other guy, an English legal eagle by the name of Francis Bacon, opted for correlation and analysis as a means of certainty. Amass enough evidence and you were halfway there. His admirers then came up with a Royal Society for doing this stuff, with correspondents all over the place sending in cards and letters filled with their observations. The Royal Society motto, “Take Nobody’s Word for It,” generated a procedure for making sure other people were seeing what you were seeing, known as “witnessing.” If enough people agreed they were all witnessing the same thing, then it was a “matter of fact.”

In the late 19th century, at the University of Nancy, France, the recent discovery of X-rays convinced people that other rays should be there too. Sure enough, once some guy demonstrated N rays (named after the town), they became a hot ticket to a Ph.D. And, no doubt, somebody got a degree, in N-ray studies. Then one day some American, who hadn’t heard about these rays, said the truth was he couldn’t see them. Sure enough, when everybody looked closer, nor could they. Collapse of theory.

This kind of collapse riddles the history of the so-called truth finding sciences. Here’s a list of the greatest hits of scientific theory collapse. For centuries it was known that disease came from miasma, a foul air emanating from marshes and putrescent materials and such creepy stuff . . . Until 1884, when Louis Pasteur discovered germs. For centuries electricity was a fluid . . . until 1820. It was a well-known fact rotten apples spontaneously generated little worms and grubs found inside them . . . until 1767. The atom was indivisible . . . until 1877 . . . Light was particles until 1801, when it became waves; until 1905, when it became particles again; until 1924, when it became both. And my all time favorite, the one that really makes my point: Space and time were absolutes until 1886, when Ersnt Mach introduced the insidious concept of relativity and set the stage for Einstein.

In the end, the can of worms Columbus opened with his trip to India is this: There is no truth to find. Truth is what you want it to be . . . (James Burke, Forbes ASAP, October 2, 2000)

In 1870 an author stated “The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” That is the point of this article and the difficulty with science. The theories of science are constantly changing and being revised with time. What seems to be true today may not be true tomorrow. Only God knows what is truth.

Eve was deceived, but not Adam (1 Tim. 2:14). It was Adam who ate of the fruit and as a result sin entered the world (Rom. 5:12, 14). It was Adam who caused the human race to fall into sin. This is called “The Fall.” Adam was created holy; but after he disobeyed God, he was a fallen or sinful man. So is every human being who has lived since him (1 Cor. 15:22). Adam’s sin against God is referred to as the original sin. It was the first sin committed by a member of the human race. But what is sin? What happened after Adam willfully disobeyed? The answers are below.

5. Sin is not a fault or a mistake. What is sin according to 1 John 3:4?

6. According to I Samuel 15:24 sin is breaking something. What is it?

7. What was the result of Adam’s sin on the man, woman, and the serpent that Satan possessed?

a. Serpent (Gen. 3:14)?

b. Woman (Gen. 3:16)?

c. Adam (Gen. 3:16-19)?

“War In Marriage”

In Genesis 3:16 God tells Eve that because of her sin, she would have a “desire” for her husband. Unfortunately, our English Bibles miss the message because the Hebrew word for “desire” does not have a positive meaning. It means that she would attempt to control him. The same Hebrew word for “desire” occurs in Genesis 4:7 where we read that “sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it.” Here the meaning of the word is clear. Sin wanted control, and God warned Cain to fight it. So in marriage the effect of the fall on women was that they would try to control their husbands. God also told Adam that he would not love his wife as he should and that he would seek to dominate her. That is the meaning of God’s statement “And he will rule over you.” The rule is an unloving rule. When we come to Ephesians 5:22-33, we find God calling Christian wives to submit to their husbands and for Christian husbands to love their wives. We are living under a curse; but with the power of the Holy Spirit living in us, our marriages can be godly and a joy. Praise the Lord.

Our Condition

God is very clear in the scriptures that we are sinners. Some folks consider themselves to be good people who sometimes make mistakes. However God has a different view. There is an old statement that says we are sinners because we sin. The truth is we sin because we are sinners. We are not good people who happen to sin. We sin because we are unholy people. When we were children, we did not sin or do wrong because of our society, our mother, our father, or some other person or thing. We sinned because we were born with an evil nature. We were born that way. The following questions will help us understand the perspective better.

8. How were we born, according to Ps. 51:5?

9. When Adam sinned (Rom. 5:14), what does Rom. 5:17 say occurred? What does Rom. 6:23 imply happened to all of us?

10. How does scripture view every man and woman, according to Rom. 3:10-11, 23?

11. How can we escape the tragedy of our sin and be forgiven or be healed, according to Gal. 3:22 and Eph. 2:8-9?

The Wrong Idea

Several years ago a man stated that after his death when he stood before God, he could convince God to let him into heaven; but for now, he would live as he desired. He considered himself to be a good negotiator. But good negotiators do their homework, and it is obvious from the Bible that he had not done his. He had not read some of the most important passages of the Bible about how God will determine our eternal future. He failed to discover that God will have already determined his destiny. He failed to understand that peace with God occurs only when one trusts Jesus Christ to forgive their sins. He failed to discover that he must become holy, and he cannot do that on his own. The following questions will reveal his error.

12. According to I John 1:8, 10, if we say we do not sin we are a

13. Some view sin as a willful act of wrong doing – a choice. Others commit sins of omission – that is, they sin unknowingly or without thought. God considers all sin to be SIN. Read I John 1:9 and determine for which sins God apparently holds every human being responsible. Does God hold us responsible for both sins of commission and omission?

14. Can we blame someone else for our sin according to James 1:13-16? How do we sin?

15. When we sin, whom do we offend, according to Ephesians 4:30 and 1 Thess. 5:19?

Things To Ponder

1. Do you consider yourself to be a sinner? Why?

2. What should the attitude of wives and husbands be toward one another in the light of this study?

3. Other types of sin are described in Romans 1:28-30. Have you ever committed murder, according to Matt. 5:21-22?

4. How can we have our sins forgiven according to Mark 2:7; Luke 24:45-47 and Acts 13:38-39?

5. What happens when you believe in and trust Jesus to forgive your sins (Rom. 5:1)?

6. 1 John 1:1-3 says that something wonderful occurs in our relationship with God when we believe in Jesus. What is it?

7. Would you like your sins to be forgiven?

The answer key is available for download.